Elisabeth Arter shares her knowledge of growing cucumbers with tips on planting and harvesting
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| Plant out seedlings in June for harvesting from late July
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'You can sow outdoor cucumber seed direct into the open ground, but I'd always recommend starting any cucumbers in pots to go outside when they have at least one pair of true leaves, because newly germinated cucumbers are ambrosia for slugs and snails.'
'Choose all-female varieties and pick off any male flowers from undercover plants to avoid bitter fruit.'
Cucumbers – Grow your own checklist
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Harvesting – A cucumber is ready to cut when its lower end is becoming rounded. Cut too soon and flavour will be poor, but left too long the skin will be tough and seeds may have started to form. Cucumbers develop rapidly and you need to look over the plants almost daily, searching well among the leaves in case the fruits are overlooked and left to grow old. Harvest time is end of May to early October for indoor types; end of July to September for outdoor types.
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Maintenance – Remove surplus side shoots and foliage to ensure good air circulation.
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Pest prevention – To avoid attack from red spider mite (that can prove fatal to greenhouse cucumbers), take care that the atmosphere around plants is never too dry and hot.
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Site – Don't grow in the same place year after year. Enriched, fertile soil is recommended.
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Timings – About six to nine days for germination; about 12-14 weeks from sowing to cutting.
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Tomatoes (growing with) – It's often said that you cannot grow cucumbers and tomatoes in the same greenhouse because cucumbers like a moister, warmer atmosphere. It's not ideal, but many gardeners do manage both in one house satisfactorily, usually by rigging up some kind of polythene partition so the cucumbers are happier. In my polytunnel, the tomatoes are grown at the sunnier end, while climbing beans on the sunny side provide some shade for the cucumbers.
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Varieties – Grow varieties resistant to diseases such as cucumber mosaic, powdery and downy mildews. Choose all-female varieties and pick off any male flowers from undercover plants to avoid bitter fruit.
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Watering – Never let the soil around the plants dry out completely.
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Yields – About 10 cucumbers per plant.
Planting cucumbers out in June
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| Outdoor ridge cucumber
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Late May to early June is about the time for planting your cucumbers out, with the threat of frost passed. If you haven't started growing any by this time, however, you can sow outdoor cucumber seeds directly in the garden or allotment, protecting the seedlings with cloches in colder areas. Cropping will begin in early August. Many gardeners, though, will have chosen to sow indoors in April, so they have established plants by June for planting out that are more able to withstand weather and pest attack.
Site preparation
If you have really good, fertile soil then no special preparation is needed for cucumbers. In the average garden, however, its pays to dig out a planting hole or a trench to a good spade's depth and about two spade's width, then fork a thick layer of rotted garden compost, manure or mushroom compost into the base before returning the soil. This should leave a slight ridge, and I like to make a shallow furrow round the edges of this to make watering easier. Cucumbers need large quantities of water as they grow, but don't like it collecting around the base of their stems, and watering in furrows like this avoids trouble. Alternatively, you can sink a flowerpot into the soil near each plant and water through that. Plants will need water every couple of days, and from a month or so after planting out, I like to give the cucumbers Maxicrop, or some other quality liquid feed, every couple of weeks.
Buying seed or plants
Take care to buy the right kind when you choose seed or plants. When I was a teenager seed firms did not check what went into their packets as thoroughly as they do now and I recall a fantastic crop of outdoor cucumbers that I grew from a packet labelled 'marrows'.
Buying seed gives the biggest choice of varieties. The best all-female F1 hybrids are expensive, but far superior to older kinds. Suttons (and others) sells pre-germinated, chitted seed that can be ordered for different delivery dates, depending on whether you have a heated or cold greenhouse. You can buy young plants ready for planting out at garden centres, but the choice of varieties is much more limited.
Cucumbers – three types
There are three types of cucumber, and it's worth deciding which group is best for you and how to grow them before you start. Outdoor types are easy – ideal for beginners and those short on time, while indoor/outdoor varieties need a bit of skill to grow well (but the reward is quality fruit). Greenhouse types produce the best fruits of all, but are best left to experienced growers.
Greenhouse cucumbers
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| Rig up a support
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When you grow cucumbers in the greenhouse, it is particularly important to keep water away from the base of the plants. With this in mind I usually cut the base off each of the 15cm (6in) pots (with the young plants still in them) and plant with this half-buried in the soil, so the roots can grow down into a moist bed but the 'ankles' are protected.
Under cover, it is quite easy to make a frame for supporting the plants so that they can grow up to the roof from a few stakes, wire and stout strings. This can be extended as the plants develop.
Indoor-to-outdoor cucumbers
Raising indoor/outdoor cucumbers calls for a bit of know-how. All female F1 hybrid 'Swing', 'Natsuhikari' and mini cucumber 'Fadia' are among the best. I germinate the seeds in my heated windowsill propagator, sowing a week or so into April and after pricking out choose a fairly warm windowsill for them to grow on. Here I improvise a plastic cover of some kind, as the tender young plants hate both drafts and a dry atmosphere. They develop rapidly and need potting on at least once to larger pots. They'll go out into my cold greenhouse when well started and will grow on there under a glass or plastic cover for a week or two, before being planted out into a prepared bed in the border. Of course you can start much earlier if you have a heated greenhouse and raise plants there, but the windowsill way is fine for most of us.
Indoor/outdoor cucumbers can be grown outside in a warm sheltered place, ideally with a big cloche or temporary frame for added warmth at least in the early weeks. But they are not nearly so happy in the open as truly outdoor cucumbers, so mine are always grown in my walk-in polytunnel, because this has always given me the best results. Last year I was cutting cucumbers there from early July to late October.
If you don't have a big polytunnel, any DIY enthusiast should be able to rig up a simple structure from some of the waste polythene sheet that is so abundant these days. One friend made a mini polytunnel (high enough to step inside and about 1.2m (4ft) square) from a few tall thin stakes and the polythene cover off a new double-bed mattress. In this he planted true greenhouse cucumbers on a very-well-prepared site. He had cut over 90 and was hoping to pass the 100 mark when an early autumn gale blew the lot down. It is possible to grow greenhouse cucumbers if you are prepared to give them such a shelter, and they are propagated in much the same way as indoor/outdoor types. Always go for F1 hybrid all-female varieties such as 'Bella', 'Birgit' and 'Pepinex'. Or, if you are growing for a small family, choose a mini variety with short fruits, such as 'Passandra'.
Outdoor cucumbers
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| Train to grow up trellis
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Modern varieties are a vast improvement on the old ridge cucumbers with pimply fruits that were sometimes seedy and bitter. You'll do much better with 'Burpless Tasty Green', 'Bush Champion' or 'Masterpiece', while for something different grow 'Crystal Apple' (sometimes called 'Crystal Lemon'), which has smallish round cucumbers that turn yellow and can be eaten like fruits.
Outdoor varieties are often called ridge cucumbers because they do so well planted on a patch of raised ground, where drainage is good but the roots can reach down into soil enriched with garden compost or rotted manure. Here the plants will sprawl over the ground, or can be trained up tripods of slim stakes, and will need plenty of water in the growing season. Some people grow cucumbers on the flat ground between their sweetcorn, the tall plants giving a bit of the dappled shade which cucumbers enjoy. You can sow seed direct into the open ground, but I'd always recommend starting any cucumbers in pots to go outside when they have at least one pair of true leaves, because newly germinated cucumbers are ambrosia for slugs and snails. Also an indoor start means that you have plants to go outside earlier and can cut cucumbers over a longer period.
Raising outdoor cucumber plants is quite easy. Towards the end of April I sow a few seeds in a pot filled with vermiculite that has been soaked for half an hour or so to make it truly moist. Always sow cucumber seeds on edge as this greatly improves germination. Cover the seeds with 1cm (½in) more vermiculite, stand in a shallow dish of water, cover with a homemade plastic bottle cloche and place on a windowsill away from direct sun. Seeds will come up in a few days and I then very carefully lift each seedling out by its leaves (never by the stem) and pot up individually in 8cm (3in) pots filled with potting compost. Stand these on a shallow tray with a little water in the bottom, so it will work up to the roots, and the young plants should grow well on a cooler windowsill away from direct sun. Once the plants have at least one good pair of true leaves they can be planted out into the garden from mid-May onwards if you cover them with cloches, large upturned jars or the bottom sections of larger clear plastic bottles at night and on cold days for the first two to three weeks. From the end of May when the risk of a late frost is past you no longer have to cover, but it still helps the plants settle in and grow away quickly.
Pots and gro-bags
Choose a spot away from direct sun, but not in deep shade and always sheltered from cold winds. Cucumbers grow very well in pots and growing bags whether on the patio, in a polytunnel or greenhouse. To give added root depth the ideal is to stand one growing bag on top of another after cutting a large hole in the top of the lower bag and a matching hole in the bottom of the top bag. Some plants grow happily with two or more different kinds in one patio container, but I'd never mix cucumbers with anything else. One well-grown plant will make so much growth and produce such a crop that it deserves ample space.
You will need to rig up a tripod of canes, or some support wires so cucumber stems can be trained upwards and the fruits can hang straight down. If growing near to a trellis or wall this should be easily accomplished with few canes and strings. Encouraging the plants to climb is particularly important with modern varieties that produce long fruits, as these are often a poor shape when plants are left to sprawl on the ground. Climbing plants also produce a heavier crop than those growing on the flat.
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